I know that in Sims 2 I was able to create multi-level decks and was able to connect them with the extending stairs. I have a house that I'd like to have a lower deck and I'd like to place stairs to connect the two levels. (all outdoors of course)

Is there some secret to doing this? I've looked through all the building tutorials here, looked through several pages in this section to see if anyone else was asking the same question but after about 7 pages, I didn't find any. Hopefully this can still be done in Sims 3. (It baffles me that there are things we could do in Sims 2 that is impossible in Sims 3. Will Sims 4 have even less things we can do?)

It is very possible in sims 3, just using the cfe cheat. What exactly did you have in mind?

I have a house on Paradise Isle where the front part is on the land & the back part is over the water. There is a deck on the back and I had made a lower deck near the mooring post. I wanted to put stairs from the upper deck, down to the lower one.

I added the lower deck using the CFE cheat, successfully added the stairs, leveled that lower deck when the stairs made a portion of it lower, added the railing, turned the CFE back on and deleted the part to the left of the stairs that separated the upper and lower deck. It looks nice, or at least to me, but when I made my Sim go down the stairs (5th screenshot) he sunk into the deck then popped back up to where he should be. When going back up those steps, he walked a bit in the air then popped down to the upper deck. I had turned the CFE off, added the lower deck, leveled a portion to be even with the upper deck which is the part where there is no roof (sunshine here), bringing it up to that level. By doing that, it raised the floor off the supports that's in the water.

It seems like your stairs aren't quite the right height for the gap between the elevations. I've seen this problem before. You need to make sure that you're upper level is the right amount above your lower deck.

The height of the lower is fixed as you need it to be the right height for boats to dock on. This means you need to make sure the higher deck is an exact amount of steps above the lower one.

I'll need to make that upper deck higher somehow. The upper deck is actually the same height as the house which started out from the front. This might be one of those things which I'll find impossible to do myself.

I deleted the steps going from the upper deck to the lower one, plus the railing which left the slanted floor I had created by using the CFE cheat. Then I did the second option of the cheat below:


Build Mode Tips
Island Paradise
Holding down the ALT key while building a foundation, deck, or stilted
foundation will create a foundation with a height of one step (normal foundations start at a height of four steps).

Holding down the ALT key while building stairs on a foundation, deck, or stilted foundations will place two or three step stairways depending on the level of the terrain.

I added the steps again then made my Sim go up and down all the steps several times & he doesn't sink into the lower deck when going down or walk above the steps when going up to the upper deck. So hopefully that did it. I might submit this house here, not sure yet though.